


*leikʷ

by Chimaera-Hero (ChimaeraKitten)



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Gen, meta/headcanon in the form of a fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 18:14:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29229831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChimaeraKitten/pseuds/Chimaera-Hero
Summary: *leikʷ-, *li-ne-kʷ-"to leave behind" in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language.Andy reflects on a habit all the immortals share.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman
Comments: 11
Kudos: 45





	*leikʷ

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you as always to trashofalltrades for the beta!

They all have their haunts. They call themselves immortal, not undead, but the distinction matters little. They pace their paths of life as any ghost does.

For Booker it’s that cold northern way—France to Russia and back again across Europe. He traces history, and home and life and family and pain and death and loneliness are gained and lost and regained.

Joe and Nicky, when left to their own devices, walk circles around the Mediterranean. North Africa, Southern Europe, the Middle East (Tunis, Genoa, Jerusalem) was home for them. They were places of life and death and rebirth and good memories forged after all of it in places like Cairo and Constantinople and Malta.

When Lykon lived, his stride carried them through Alexander’s places. Andromache and Quỳnh followed him through Egypt and Greece and all of Persia, and he died before those places forgot they were once Alexander’s.

When Quỳnh was free, she circled Asia—from her birthplace in Vietnam to the southern tip of Korea to the Gobi Desert and the forbidding heights of the Himalayas—all the places she went when she was alone, walked forever after with a companion at her side.

Andromache is and was and always will be a creature of the steppes. She has no real way of knowing how far she traveled before someone buried her own weapon in her back and changed everything, but she feels it in her feet still, and always returns to those lost places north of the Black Sea, pacing ever eastward and then westward again with the changing seasons, ever retracing her own footsteps and the footsteps of a thousand generations gone—most before even her birth, but still so many after.

Where will Nile walk, she wonders? Nile, whose face holds the marks of a world shattered and changing and brought (bound) closer together than ever before. Nile was born in Chicago, on the banks of lakes so broad they could be her own version of Andy’s sea, for all that their water is fresh. She was born there, and she died half a world away, closer to Lykon’s places, to Nicky’s and Joe’s and even Andy’s than to her own birth. Closer even to the shores her ancestors were stolen from than to the shores where Nile grew up. Andy walks in the footsteps of her own ancestors, even now that they are all dead and dust and unremembered. Nile has no footsteps to walk in, no dusty track as familiar as her own bones. All Nile has are airplanes and the smell of fuel and a family still living and breathing, but too distant to touch.

And Andromache will not live to see Nile’s paces, will not know if she ever takes up their practice of carving roads deep into the earth with nothing but persistence and their own two feet.

(She does, of course, but by that point the distances between Nile’s birth and death and rebirth are meaningless, confined as they are to Earth. The next of them will walk roads paved not with stones or the beaten down dust of two hundred thousand years of human feet, but with starlight and dark matter and fourteen billion years of gravity. And Nile will watch and think of Andromache’s path across the steppes, the one they all walked together in those first (last) years, and Nile will understand for the first time the worry her mentor expressed that she would never find this for herself.)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because the headcanon possessed me during a break from one of the longer fics I'm writing, which makes this my first but hopefully not last fic for this fandom!


End file.
